No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2018
This paper offers a new account of Leo Strauss's critique of historicism in Natural Right and History. According to the general view of this critique, Strauss tries to show that historicism wrongly denies the possibility of knowledge of universal and unchangeable principles of right. I argue that this view only reflects Strauss's exoteric critique of historicism, and that, apart from it, he gives an esoteric critique. According to this esoteric critique, historicism ignores the necessity of prudence, in the sense of making “concrete decisions” which suspend universal and unchangeable principles of right. In this light, I also show that Strauss's critique of historicism depends on Carl Schmitt's concept of the “decision,” but that Strauss simultaneously critiques Schmitt in Natural Right and History.
1 Apart from Natural Right and History, the text on which I will focus, Strauss's most sustained critiques of historicism are in “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (1962): 559–86Google Scholar; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; “Political Philosophy and History,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Gildin, Hilail (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss” (“Existentialism”), ed. Bolotin, David, Bruell, Christopher, and Pangle, Thomas L., Interpretation 22, no. 3 (1995): 301–38Google Scholar.
2 “What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 26 (italics added).
3 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History [hereafter NRH] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar.
4 NRH, 5.
5 NRH, 34.
6 NRH, 28. I will return to Heidegger's “radical historicism” below.
7 NRH, 18.
8 See Tarcov, Nathan, Philosophy & History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work of Leo Strauss,” Polity 16, no. 1 (1983): 5–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Umphrey, Stewart, “Natural Right and Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Deutsch, Kenneth L. and Nicgorski, Walter (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994)Google Scholar; Norton, Anne, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Major, Rafael, “The Cambridge School and Leo Strauss: Texts and Contexts of American Political Science,” Political Research Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2005): 477–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Steven B., “Leo Strauss's Platonic Liberalism,” in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Velkley, Richard L., Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6; Gottfried, Paul Edward, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Melzer, Arthur M., Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 10; Culp, Jonathan F., “‘On Collingwood's Philosophy of History’ and ‘On a New Interpretation of Plato's Political Philosophy,’” in Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought, ed. Burns, Timothy W. (Leiden: Brill, 2015)Google Scholar; and Keedus, Liisi, The Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, chap. 3.
9 NRH, 160.
10 For the distinction between “exoteric” and “esoteric,” see Bagley, Paul J., “On the Practice of Esotericism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 2 (1992): 231–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the idea of “multilevel” writing, which on the one hand articulates an exoteric or explicit view that is not strictly justified, and on the other an esoteric or hidden view that is strictly justified, see Galston, Miriam, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The question whether Strauss writes esoterically is controversial; see Brague, Rémi, “Leo Strauss and Maimonides,” in Leo Strauss's Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement, ed. Udoff, Alan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991)Google Scholar; Rosen, Stanley, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 115ff.; Frazer, Michael, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern: Strauss Contra Straussianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,” Political Theory 34, no. 1 (2006): 33–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zuckert, Catherine and Zuckert, Michael, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 131ff.
11 See, for example, Principle and Prudence in Western Political Thought, ed. Lynch, Christopher and Marks, Jonathan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
12 See Volpi, Franco, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelianism,” trans. Buzzetti, Eric, in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Bartlett, Robert C. and Collins, Susan D. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
13 See, for example, Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)Google Scholar, appendix; MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar, 393.
14 NRH, 159; Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 6, 14, 30, 31, 34; Schmitt, , The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27, 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmitt, , Constitutional Theory, trans. and ed. Seitzer, Jeffrey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 78, 112, 125; Schmitt, , Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle, trans. Hoelzl, Michael and Ward, Graham (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 7–8Google Scholar, 102, 150–51.
15 Meier, Heinrich, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Lomax, J. Harvey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar, and Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Brainard, Marcus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
16 Vatter, Miguel, “Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation between Political Theology and Liberalism,” New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCormick, John, “Post-Enlightenment Sources of Political Authority: Biblical Atheism, Political Theology and the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 175–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Meier, Hidden Dialogue, 86n110.
18 The “hidden dialogue” that Meier considers is that found between Strauss's 1932 review article of The Concept of the Political and Schmitt's subsequent revision of his text. Of course, Meier's negligence of NRH is justified by his subject. On the other hand, he attempts to draw general conclusions vis-à-vis Strauss's relation to Schmitt and Strauss's thought as a whole, for example: “Whereas the political does have central significance for the thought of Leo Strauss, the enemy and enmity do not” (Hidden Dialogue, 87). As I will show, NRH, precisely insofar as it depends on Schmitt's ideas, contradicts this last suggestion. Other scholars who have addressed Strauss's relation to Schmitt have also restricted their attention to Strauss's 1932 review article; see, for example, Janssens, David, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss's Early Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Janssens, indeed, overlooks Strauss's reliance on Schmitt for his conception of natural right in NRH (Between Athens and Jerusalem, 191).
19 NRH, 13, 16. Strauss does not explicitly ascribe “radical historicism” to Heidegger, but, as I will discuss below, his account of it makes clear that it refers to Heidegger. In “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 27, while Strauss again does not refer to Heidegger by name, he writes that “it was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise.”
20 NRH, 10.
21 NRH, 13–16, 37.
22 NRH, 18.
23 NRH, 12, 20 (italics added). Compare Paul, Herman J., “A Collapse of Trust: Reconceptualizing the Crisis of Historicism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008): 63–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 NRH, 18.
25 NRH, 18.
26 NRH, 4–5.
27 Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism, 108.
28 NRH, 10n3.
29 NRH, 41–42.
30 NRH, 43.
31 Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism, 109. Similarly, Behnegar, Nasser, Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87Google Scholar, states that “by showing that Weber's thesis leads to nihilism, Strauss does not solve the problem underlying that thesis,” but overlooks that Strauss draws attention to this failure. Strauss elsewhere points to the fallacy of determining truth through practical consequences; see “Preface to the English Translation,” in Spinoza's Critique of Religion, trans. Sinclair, E. M. (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 11Google Scholar: “But just as an assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, so it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying. The serious question concerns man's certainty or knowledge.”
32 NRH, 24.
33 See Smith, “Leo Strauss's Platonic Liberalism,” 101ff., and “Destruktion or Recovery? On Strauss's Critique of Heidegger,” in Reading Leo Strauss, 119ff.; Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 331, 351–52; Umphrey, “Natural Right and Philosophy,” 278; Zuckert and Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 101.
34 Pippin, Robert, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 223n35.
35 NRH, 24.
36 Given the first premise, Strauss's argument might appear only to be ex hypothesi; however, as the last premise makes clear, the first is true only if it agrees with the historicist thesis (“This would be the case even if it were true…”). Strauss's first argument against historicism is also dialectical; it appeals to commonly accepted beliefs about the unacceptability of nihilism, but this is not a “strict” argument.
37 NRH, 39. Commentators on the zetetic response have overlooked this sentence.
38 NRH, 25. See Smith, Steven B., “Introduction: Leo Strauss Today,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Smith, Steven B. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 NRH, 28.
40 NRH, 27.
41 See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)Google Scholar, ¶74. By emphasizing that Dasein chooses its thrownness, Strauss is describing, specifically, Heidegger's conception of Dasein's “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit); Dasein's “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit) is its failure to make such a choice. See Being and Time, ¶9. Also compare Leo Strauss, “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss,” 329: “[for Heidegger] man is a project which is thrown somewhere (geworfener Entwurf). The leap through which Sein is experienced is primarily the awareness-acceptance of being thrown, of finiteness, the abandonment of every thought of a railing, a support” (italics in original).
42 The context makes it clear that Strauss is referring to radical historicism.
43 NRH, 28.
44 According to Smith, “Leo Strauss's Platonic Liberalism,” 101, Umphrey, “Natural Right and Philosophy,” 278, and Zuckert and Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 101, Strauss does offer an argument against Heidegger's radical historicism, namely, his zetetic conception of philosophy. This view, however, overlooks the dialectical structure of the first chapter of NRH. Strauss introduces the zetetic conception of philosophy at NRH, 23–24, as an argument against historicism; then proceeds to indicate the problems with that argument; then—because of those problems—charges historicism with self-contradictoriness or absurdity; and only then introduces Heidegger's radical historicism. So far, then, from being an argument against Heidegger's radical historicism, the zetetic conception of philosophy is an argument against historicism (simply) that fails, and whose failure motivates the introduction of another argument, to which Heidegger's radical historicism is the rejoinder. Moreover, it is clear that the zetetic conception of philosophy is as inadequate an argument against Heidegger's radical historicism as it is against historicism (simply), for, like the latter, Heidegger's radical historicism would deny the assumption that “fundamental problems” “persist in all historical change.” Additionally, since Heidegger's radical historicism views knowledge as a choice of fate, it would deny the relevance of zetetic inquiry.
45 NRH, 31.
46 The antagonism between historicism and political philosophy thus resembles the “secular struggle between philosophy and theology” that Strauss discusses in NRH, 74–75. It is important to note that Strauss understands this struggle in the following manner: “No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance” (NRH, 74); in other words, it is a conflict that concerns the ground of practical action, not that of knowledge.
47 Kennington, Richard, “Strauss's Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics 35, no. 1 (1981): 62Google Scholar.
48 NRH, 16.
49 Lenzner, Steven J., “Strauss's Three Burkes: The Problem of Edmund Burke in Natural Right and History,” Political Theory 19, no. 3 (1991): 364–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Ibid., 368.
51 Ibid., 370.
52 NRH, 303.
53 In this section (specifically, from the following quoted passage to the one cited at n. 71), all quotations that Strauss provides are to Burke.
54 NRH, 303–4.
55 NRH, 305.
56 NRH, 305–6.
57 NRH, 307; also see 303.
58 NRH, 307.
59 NRH, 310.
60 NRH, 313.
61 NRH, 314.
62 Lenzner, “Strauss's Three Burkes,” 370, overlooks this difference; for him, Burke breaks from the “classics” by opposing the “theoretically best regime” as Aristotle conceives of it. Strauss's view is the exact opposite: Burke places a comparatively higher value on “theory” than do the “classics.” Compare Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, 88: “Because of its direct relation to political life classical political philosophy was essentially ‘practical’; on the other hand, it is no accident that modern political philosophy frequently calls itself political ‘theory.’ The primary concern of the former was not the description, or understanding, of political life, but its right guidance.” Moreover, Strauss links the “practical” orientation of “classical political philosophy” to its concern with antagonism: “[classical political philosophy] is concerned primarily with the inner structure of the political community, because that inner structure is essentially the subject of such political controversy as essentially involves the danger of civil war” (“On Classical Political Philosophy,” 85).
63 NRH, 314.
64 NRH, 320, 315.
65 NRH, 315; compare NRH, 316 (“Burke paves the way for the ‘historical school’”).
66 NRH, 314–15.
67 NRH, 315.
68 NRH, 152.
69 NRH, 25. Strauss uses this formulation to describe Heidegger's radical historicism elsewhere; see “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 30. This formulation certainly recalls Heidegger's “dispensation of being” (Geschick des Seins); see Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976)Google Scholar, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus.’” But it also recalls the Christian concept of dispensatio, and, indeed, Strauss remarks that, for Burke, historical events are a “providential dispensation”; compare the pertinent discussion in Vatter, Miguel, “Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence,” Review of Politics 75, no. 4 (2013): 610–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Finally, both “fateful dispensation” and “providential dispensation” recall Socrates's statement in the Republic that, absent political skill, the preservation of the philosophers against the corruption by the multitude can only be due to a “divine dispensation” (theou moiran); see Republic 493a. In “Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crito,” 48, and “On the Euthydemus,” 69, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Strauss refers to a “divine dispensation” in connection with Socrates. Also compare n. 19 above.
70 NRH, 315.
71 NRH, 321.
72 NRH, 303.
73 See NRH, 32: “radical (‘existentialist’) historicism.”
74 Strauss makes a similar criticism of Heidegger in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” 33–34. Comparing Heidegger's “philosophy of history,” and specifically his “vision” of “the moment in which the final insight is arriving” to that of Marx and Nietzsche, Strauss explains that, for Heidegger, the “moment” in question is brought about, above all, by a “dialogue between the most profound thinkers of the Occident and the most profound thinkers of the Orient.” Strauss then comments: “That dialogue and everything that it entails, but surely not political action of any kind, is perhaps the way. Heidegger severs the connection of the vision with politics more radically than either Marx or Nietzsche. One is inclined to say that Heidegger has learned the lesson of 1933 more thoroughly than any other man. Surely he leaves no place for political philosophy.”
75 NRH, 157.
76 NRH, 156.
77 NRH, 157.
78 NRH, 158.
79 Compare Fortin, Ernest L., “Thomas Aquinas,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 266–67Google Scholar, and especially his remarks on Aquinas's treatment of St. Lawrence. Potts, Timothy C., Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 46–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, observes that Aquinas transforms the Platonic distinction between knowledge of the unchangeable and belief in the changeable, into the distinction between knowledge of the unchangeable and knowledge of necessary truth—the latter being synderesis. Aquinas thus radically restricts the flexibility inherent in Plato's “belief.”
80 NRH, 157.
81 NRH, 158.
82 NRH, 158.
83 NRH, 159.
84 NRH, 159.
85 NRH, 158.
86 NRH, 159.
87 NRH, 160.
88 NRH, 161.
89 Lenzner, “Strauss's Three Burkes,” 369.
90 Strauss's example of the derivation in question is the return of deposits (NRH, 157).
91 In “Marsilius of Padua,” in History of Political Philosophy, 292–93, Strauss explains that, against Aquinas, Marsilius holds that “the universally admitted rules of right are not rational since there exists a natural necessity to transgress them,” and that Marsilius's position can be best understood “if one starts from the fact that he implicitly denies the existence of first principles of practical reason,” that is, synderesis according to Aquinas.
92 NRH, 164.
93 NRH, 130; compare NRH, 164.
94 In “Destruktion or Recovery?,” 120–21, Smith suggests that the passage quoted above is part of Strauss's view of “the experience of natural right as a doctrine of limits and constraints,” and that Strauss opposes this view to historicism and in particular radical historicism. The unwieldy formulation “experience of … a doctrine” points to the problem with Smith's interpretation; Strauss is suggesting that the “experience” in question, that is, “natural conscience,” precisely “limits and constrains” natural right.
95 NRH, 318.
96 This reification is connected to Strauss's suggestion that historicism is the basis of the positivist conflation of the “is” and the “ought”; see NRH, 73.
97 See Being and Time, ¶¶57–59. For the relation between Aquinas and Kierkegaard, which is relevant to this issue in Heidegger, see Theunissen, Michael, Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair, trans. Harshaw, Barbara and Illbruck, Helmut (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 95ff.
98 NRH, 158.
99 In the section on Burke, Strauss alludes to this necessity: for Burke, “the very habit of stating … extreme cases is not very laudable or safe” (Strauss directly quotes Burke), and “temporary solutions of continuity must be ‘kept from the eye,’ or a ‘politic, well-wrought veil’ must be thrown over them” (NRH, 300, 310).
100 Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 161ff.
101 In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss discusses “repetition” as a major element of esoteric writing; see “Introduction,” 15–17, and “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 62–64.
102 “How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 185; also see “Introduction,” 13.
103 Lenzner also suggests that the section on Burke is esoteric, although for different reasons from those stated here; see “Strauss's Three Burkes,” 373–74, 377ff.
104 These considerations do not exhaust the significance of NRH for the subject of esotericism, or for the relation between esotericism and the critique of historicism. According to Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, chap. 10, and Zuckert and Zuckert, Truth about Leo Strauss, 123, Strauss believes the practice of esotericism itself contributes to the critique of historicism by undermining the evidence frequently adduced for historicism that philosophers share beliefs that belong to their historical context: this practice shows that, insofar as philosophers endorse such beliefs, they do so “exoterically” or insincerely. The critique of historicism that I have outlined above, however, suggests an alternative view of how, for Strauss, the practice of esotericism critiques historicism: that practice is prudent—indeed, is the prudence of philosophers—and therefore is the necessity that historicism ignores and without which rationality cannot be actualized. While I cannot substantiate this view here, in “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (published one year before NRH), Strauss understands Maimonides's esotericism as prudent and indeed a “decision”: in the Guide, “Maimonides decided to write down the secret teaching” of the Torah; while he wrote down this secret teaching esoterically, his decision still “implies a conscious transgression of an unambiguous prohibition,” namely, the prohibition against any written explanation of the secret teaching of the Torah; and yet “only an urgent necessity of nation-wide bearing [the Diaspora] can have driven Maimonides to transgressing an explicit prohibition,” or again, “only the necessity of saving the law can have caused [Maimonides] to break the law” (“The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 48–51). I can also add that, on Melzer's and the Zuckerts’ view, the critique of historicism provided by the practice of esotericism rests on a petitio principii: this practice only undermines the evidence for historicism if, apart from exoterically endorsing views that belong to their historical context, philosophers also endorse views that transcend that context, for otherwise every view that they endorse will belong to their historical context, as historicism suggests. But that philosophers endorse such transcendent views cannot be established by their practice of esotericism.
105 Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 123. Velkley refers to Strauss's remark in “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss,” 305.
106 NRH, 4n2; Schmitt, Political Theology, 14, 71ff.; Constitutional Theory, 63–64.
107 NRH, 315.
108 Schmitt, Carl, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Kennedy, Ellen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 54Google Scholar.
109 Ibid., 23.
110 NRH, 318.
111 See Dictatorship, 118–19, and McCormick, John, “The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism, ed. Dyzenhaus, David (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
112 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5–7, 15; Concept of the Political, 46.
113 Schmitt, Political Theology, 6–7.
114 Ibid., 7.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., 61.
117 Ibid., 37, 27. Many interpreters have therefore wrongly suggested that Schmitt's “decision” is absolutely unconstrained and effectively identical to the unfathomable will of God. See, for example, Wolin, Richard, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 39Google Scholar; Kalyvas, Andreas, “From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 324CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To be sure, in Political Theology, 12, Schmitt writes that “the decision frees itself from all normative ties”; however, as he immediately specifies, “normative” refers only to norms belonging to a “legal order.” Also compare Dictatorship, 8: “Here we can no longer ask about legal considerations, only about the appropriate means that would lead to a concrete result in a concrete case. Of course, the decision and the proceedings may be right or wrong, but the way to judge these matters is only related to the question whether the means, in a very technical sense, are appropriate or not—that is, whether they have achieved their goal.” Altman, William H. F., “The Alpine Limits of Jewish Thought: Leo Strauss, National Socialism, and Judentum ohne Gott,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2009): 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while recognizing that Strauss adopts Schmitt's “decisionism,” understands this as the necessity of making “a groundless choice” (27), but thereby inverts the meaning that the “decision” has for both Schmitt and Strauss. Tellingly (and although it is his subject), Altman never refers to Strauss's discussion of “concrete decisions” in NRH, which is the most explicit treatment of this theme in his entire work, and never refers to any passage in Schmitt's work as a whole dealing with the “decision.”
118 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 45.
119 Schmitt, Carl, Political Romanticism, trans. Oakes, Guy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 63Google Scholar.
120 Ibid., 85ff.
121 Ibid., 115, 117. Occasionalism plays a major role in theological-political disputes going back as far as medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophy. See Fakhry, Majid, Islamic Occasionalism and Its Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958)Google Scholar.
122 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 81.
123 Ibid., 80.
124 Ibid., 81 (italics in original).
125 NRH, 317.
126 NRH, 162.
127 Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
128 NRH, 179.
129 Strauss makes the same point in his interpretation of Aristotle's thesis: “it is not possible to define precisely what constitutes an extreme situation in contradistinction to a normal situation” (NRH, 161).
130 Schmitt, Political Theology, 6 (italics added).
131 In NRH, Strauss critiques Hobbes's “doctrine of sovereignty” from this perspective. According to Strauss, the “boast” of this doctrine is that “it gives its due to the extreme case, to what holds in emergency situations, whereas those who question that doctrine are accused of not looking beyond the pale of normality… . It is in the extreme situation, when the social fabric has completely broken down, that there comes to sight the solid foundation on which every social order must ultimately rest: the fear of violent death, which is the strongest force in human life” (NRH, 196). Strauss then objects: “Hobbes was forced to concede that the fear of violent death is only ‘commonly’ or in most cases the most powerful support. The principle which was supposed to make possible a political doctrine of universal applicability, then, is not universally valid and therefore is useless in what, from Hobbes's point of view, is the most important case—the extreme case. For how can one exclude the possibility that precisely in the extreme situation the exception will prevail?” Hobbes's doctrine of sovereignty is imprudent: it trusts a merely normal rule, the fear of violent death, to settle the extreme situation, that is, one in which precisely not a normal rule but rather “the exception will prevail.”